Quantam Rose (7 page)

With unexpected grace, Vyrl slid out of the chair and caught her around the waist. Holding her bent over his arm, he leaned down to kiss her. Startled, Kamoj just stared up at him.

He stopped, then straightened up, bringing her with him. "Don't you ever smile?"

"Well-yes. Of course."

Vyrl stepped away from the pool. "Maybe we should-ah!" He lifted his foot and pulled a shard of glass out of his heel. Blood welled up from the cut. With a grimace, he stuck his foot in the water and swirled it around until the blood washed away. His graceful way of moving made her think of a greenglass stag.

He smiled. "Either that's a compliment to me or an insult to the greenglass, I'm not sure which."

"How do you do that?" she asked.

"Do what?"

"Know my thoughts."

"I don't." He took her hand. "Come on. Let's go somewhere with less glass."

They picked their way through the shards and went into the main bedroom. Although he walked reasonably well, several times he put one foot down on the other and stumbled. When they reached the dais with his bed, he stopped, said, "We should do this right," and hefted her up into his arms.

Hai! The last thing Kamoj wanted was a half-drunk man carrying her up stairs. "It's all right,"

she said. "I can walk."

He started up the dais. "You hardly weigh anything."

They made it to the top with no mishaps, but then he tripped. He took a huge step forward, lunging for the bed, and tossed her across it as he lost his balance. She hit the mattress with a thud, pillows tumbling around her head, and Vyrl landed on top her. Her breath wumped out with a muffled

"oomph."

"Ai," Vyrl muttered, rolling off her. "My sorry, Chamois."

This time she was too flustered even to think of correcting the name. When he pulled her into his arms, she stuttered, "Maybe you should, uh, call a healer." She knew she was talking too fast, but she couldn't stop. "For your-for your, you know. Your foot."

"My foot?" He smiled at her. "Why?"

"It's just, mine swelled-Vyrl! What are you doing?"

"Looking at my beautiful wife." As his hands moved, he slid lower along her body. Then he closed his mouth around her breast and suckled her through the glimsilk of her underdress.

Kamoj flushed, blinked, said, "Oh, my," cleared her throat, and coughed. Then she sighed and put her hands in his hair, tangling her fingers in his curls.

Some time later she murmured, "You're different than I expected."

He came back up, cradling her in his arms. "How is that?"

Too late, she realized how her answer would sound: I thought you would be cruel. She tried to hide the thought, imagining a blanket to cover it. "You're younger."

Vyrl grinned. "Such sweet words." He fingered the garter that held up her stocking. Then he sat up and tugged the lacy ring off her leg. Setting it on his palm, he squinted at it as if it were another life form. "It's pretty," he said. "But who'd ever think to make such a thing?"

"I don't know," Kamoj admitted. Lyode had given it to her.

Vyrl set the garter on the bed. Then he touched her thigh where the garter had held up her stocking. "So soft . . ." Taking her stocking by the toe, he pulled it off through the gold circlet around her ankle. "And soft here-saints almighty, what is that?"

She wished he would go back to showing her what was soft. "What?"

Vyrl peered at the sole of her foot. "This is serious." He lay on his back and stretched out next to her, reaching his arm out to a tanglebirch stand by the bed. He so distracted Kamoj, she barely noticed him press a panel on the nightstand.

A drowsy voice came out of the air. "Colonel Pacal here."

"Hai!" Kamoj sat bolt upright and clamped her arms over her breasts, looking around for the owner of the voice.

"I need you up here," Vyrl said to the air.

The woman suddenly sounded awake. "On my way."

"For flaming sakes," Vyrl said. "Don't say it like that."

"Like what?" the woman asked.

"Like 'What has he done to that poor girl?'"

"Is she all right?"

"Her foot is hurt."

"I'll be right there."

"All right. Out." Vyrl pushed the panel again.

After the room remained silent for several moments, Kamoj's pulse calmed. "Who was that?" she asked.

"Dazza." Vyrl drew her back down next to him. "My doctor."

"What is a doctor?"

He tugged apart her arms and pulled them around his waist so she was hugging him. "Healer."

"But where is she? We're the only ones here."

Kissing her, he murmured, "She's coming."

After several moments of discovering that she liked kissing Vyrl far more than she had ever liked kissing Jax, Kamoj moved her lips to his ear and spoke shyly. "If someone is coming up here, shouldn't we get dressed?"

"Ai . . . " He sighed. "I guess so."

While Kamoj sat up, pulling her dress into place, Vyrl went to the wardrobe across the room and took out a blue glimsilk robe with iridescent green and gold highlights. As he was putting it on, a knock came from the entrance foyer. Tying his sash, he crossed the room and opened the door.

Dazza stood outside in rumpled trousers and a shirt, her hair tousled as if she had just pulled herself out of bed. She had something in her hand, Kamoj wasn't sure what. A large black book? As the doctor entered the suite, she glanced at Kamoj, at the stocking on the bed, and at Vyrl. Then she reddened. It didn't surprise Kamoj that the colonel looked like she wished she were someplace else.

"It's her left foot," Vyrl said.

While Vyrl leaned against the bedpost with his arms crossed, Dazza sat on the bed and lifted Kamoj's foot. Her awkwardness vanished as she focused on the problem. "Did you treat this cut?"

she asked Kamoj.

"I soaked it in water," Kamoj said.

Dazza looked up at her. "Right away?" When Kamoj shook her head, the doctor said, "If you ever get a cut like this again, clean it as soon as you can." She set down Kamoj's foot and opened her

"book." Its top lifted like a box, revealing tubes and squares. When Dazza touched a small square, ghost pictures appeared above the box, rotating in the air, each with a different view of a woman's body. Red and blue lines veined one, another showed a skeleton, and a third internal organs. Kamoj had heard tales of how the ancients made ghosts dance this way, but until now she had never believed them.

Dazza studied symbols flickering on the rectangles on her box. "You're a healthy young woman." She snapped a featherless black quill off her book and bent over Kamoj's heel as if she were going to write on it.

Kamoj jerked away her foot. "What are you doing?"

"Numbing the area." With a gentle touch, Dazza tugged back her foot. "So it won't hurt when I drain the wound."

Although Kamoj found that hard to believe, the pain did indeed recede after Dazza wrote on her heel with her quill. The doctor kept working, though Kamoj couldn't see what she was doing.

"Gods," Vyrl said. "That's a bad one."

Intent on her work, Dazza said, "If we hadn't caught it in time, she could have lost the foot."

Kamoj blanched. No wonder it had hurt so much when Jax jabbed it.

"Kimono?" Vyrl said. "Are you all right?"

Dazza made an exasperated noise. "Saints above, Vyrl. Her name is Kamoj."

He reddened. "My sorry, Kamoj."

Smiling, she said, "It's all right."

Dazza withdrew her quill, catching drops of blood from its tip with her finger. She cleaned Kamoj's heel with a white mesh and then removed a new quill from the box. When she pressed a knob on it, a spray came out of its tip and coated Kamoj's sole.

"The nanomeds will aid the healing," Dazza said. "Then they'll dissolve in your bloodstream."

"Non-muds?" Kamoj asked. That made no sense.

"Nanomeds," Dazza said. "Each has an active moiety linked to a picochip-" She stopped, watching Kamoj's face. Then she said, "They're like machines, but so small you can't see them."

"Nanobots?" Kamoj asked.

"Say again?" Dazza asked. "I have trouble with your accent."

"She said nanobots," Vyrl said. "She's speaking Iotic."

Kamoj stared at him. He understood Iotaca? Then again, he had read the contract scroll at their wedding, which was written in pure Iotaca. Maybe he could clear up the mystery of what the blasted thing said.

Dazza, however, also looked puzzled. "Why do you say it that way, as if she used a different language for 'nanobot'? Everything we've said is in Iotic."

Vyrl shook his head. "You and I may be speaking Iotic, but the people here don't. Or not pure Iotic. Their 'Bridge' language is a dialect."

It would never have occurred to Kamoj to describe Bridge as a dialect of Iotaca. The differences seemed too extreme to call them two forms of the same language. But then, to the people of the Northern Lands any change was extreme.

"Nanobot is a word from the temple language," Kamoj said.

"I haven't heard enough of your temple language to be sure," Vyrl said, "but I think it's what we call classical Iotic. That contract I read at the ceremony was written in it. What Dazza and I are speaking now is modern Iotic."

Dazza regarded him with curiosity. "You speak the classics?"

"I learned them when I was a boy," he said.

The doctor looked impressed. "You must have had a good education."

He shrugged. "There were no schools where we lived, so my parents brought in tutors from offworld."

Kamoj wondered what he meant by offworld. Whatever it was, she too found the result impressive. "I can pronounce words and phrases in Iotaca," she said, "but I don't understand it all. Like nanobot. I know the word but not the meaning."

"Do you know what 'molecule' means?" Dazza asked. When Kamoj shook her head, Dazza said, "It's like a tiny machine. A nanobot is designed for a specific duty. Different types have different duties. The ones we carry in our bodies, that help make us healthy, we call nanomeds. Each one has a picochip attached to it, a quantum computer." She paused. "Think of it as a brain. The picochip tells the nanobot what to do and how to make more of itself. If you put a lot of them together, their chips combine into a what we call a picoweb. A bigger brain."

Kamoj blinked. "You put all that in my foot?"

A smile gentled Dazza's face. "I did indeed. Three types of nanomed, in fact. Two help ferry nutrients and structural materials to the wound and maintain your physiological balance while you heal. The third catalyzes molecular repair processes."

"Catalyze?" Kamoj asked.

"Helps them go faster."

"Is she going to be all right?" Vyrl asked.

"She'll be fine by tomorrow." Dazza snapped her quill into her box. Concentrating on her displays, the doctor said, "She should stay off that foot for the rest of the night, however."

Vyrl started to speak, then just smiled. Kamoj flushed. Walking clearly wasn't what he had in mind for the rest of the night.

Dazza closed the lid of her book-box and looked up at Vyrl. "Did you talk to Azander after you arrived?"

"Not really," Vyrl answered. "Why?"

"He said you were followed by Ironbridge stagmen."

"Ironbridge? Why?"

"Azander seemed to think you would know."

"I've no idea," Vyrl said.

His response disquieted Kamoj. Ironbridge was nothing to ignore. What was Jax up to?

Watching her, Vyrl sat on the bed. "What is it, water sprite? What troubles you about Ironbridge?"

Dazza drew in a sharp breath. Startled, Kamoj glanced at her. The colonel had the look of a healer whose patient had just showed signs of a recovery the healer had feared would never happen. It made no sense to Kamoj. Vyrl wasn't sick, at least that she could see. Except for the rum. But he wasn't drunk now, and all he had done was ask her about Ironbridge.

He hadn't noticed Dazza's reaction. Intent on Kamoj, he said, "Talk to me."

"It is forbidden," Kamoj answered.

"To talk to me?"

"For me to talk of Ironbridge."

"Why?"

"Because you and I have a dowered merger."

"Why does that make a difference?"

She wasn't actually sure why tradition forbade discussing other bid candidates with the winner of a hostile merger. Rules changed in situations like this, when the balance of power tipped so far in favor of one party. "Hostile" was probably the operative word; if she spoke about Ironbridge she could aggravate Vyrl and so bring harm to herself, Argali, and Ironbridge.

"It is forbidden," she repeated.

Vyrl glanced at Dazza with an expression that clearly said: Can you do something with this?

Dazza considered her. "If Prince Havyrl gives you permission to speak about Ironbridge, can you do it?"

Vyrl made an exasperated noise. "She doesn't need my permission to talk."

Kamoj looked from Vyrl to Dazza, at a loss to understand the strange hierarchy of authority here.

Dazza tried again. "Can you talk to me about it?"

"No," Kamoj said.

"Who can we ask?"

Who indeed? Maxard, perhaps. He hadn't married Vyrl. He was less likely to incur Lionstar wrath by talking about Kamoj's relationship with another man.

"My uncle," Kamoj said.

"We can send someone to Argali tomorrow." Vyrl grimaced. "Which'll be forever with how long the nights here last."

Kamoj wondered what he meant. Nights weren't long in autumn, not compared to winter, when snow covered the world and blizzards roared down from the North Sky Islands.

Dazza was watching her. "This is about your customs, isn't it? All of you here, you're afraid of showing disrespect. That's important. Respect. To custom, to authority, and to the land."

Relief settled over Kamoj. Dazza understood. "Yes."

Vyrl blinked at the doctor. "Where did you get all that?"

With a scowl, Dazza said, "From talking to your ever-so-patient butler the last time you went riding during one of your binges. I wanted to know why no one stopped you."

"Don't start with me, Dazza."

"Why? Because you happen to be more sober now than you've been in weeks? You're going to kill yourself."